China has built the world’s largest High Speed Rail (HSR) network. Its environmental impacts have been examined by the means of life cycle assessment (LCA) which describes the whole picture of the HSR system instead of single stages, with a case study for the highspeed railway that links Beijing and Shanghai. The research employs the China-specific life cycle inventory database Chinese Core Lif...

In April 2009 the US government unveiled its blueprint for a national network of high-speed passenger rail (HSR) lines aimed at reducing traffic congestion, cutting national dependence on foreign oil and improving rural and urban environments. In implementing such a program, it is essential to identify the factors that might influence decision making and the eventual success of the HSR project,...

During the last decade Railways have become one of the most advanced and fast developing branches of transportation technology. The reason is very high speeds achievable by the most advanced modern trains (French TGV, German ICE, Italian Pendolino, Swedish X2000, Spanish AVE, Belgium Thalys, the Eurostar) and very low air pollution per passenger compared with road vehicles. Unfortunately, the i...

Useful lifetime evaluation of railpads were very important in design procedure to assure the safety and reliability. It is, therefore, necessary to establish a suitable criterion for the replacement period of rail pads. In this study, we performed properties and accelerated heat aging tests of rail pads considering degradation factors and all environmental conditions including operation, and th...

A megacity is usually defined as a metropolitan area with a total population in excess of 10 million people. The number of megacities is increasing worldwide: in 1950 they were 4; in 1980 they were 28, in 2002 they were 39 and by 2015 they will be 59. In most agglomerations and megacities, urban planning and public infrastructure can guide the urban development in order to achieve a proper sust...

In order to prevent unpleasant incidents, preservation high-speed railway vehicle stability has vital importance. For this purpose, railway vehicle is modeled using a 38-DOF. This paper presents an investigation on limit cycle and bifurcation of high speed railway behavior. It is revealed that the critical hunting speed decreases by increasing the wheel conicity. Also the critical hunting speed...

Rail irregularity is one of the most effective factors in train derailment. theste irregularities have generally random distribution that are assumed to be stationary random and ergodic processes in space, with Gaussian amplitude probabiliy densities and zero mean values. The quality of irregularities, their distribution along the rails and wagon speed are the main factors for train derailment ...

The development of high-speed intelligent rail transit has increased the number of sensors applied on trains. These play an important role in train state control and monitoring. These sensors generally work in a severe environment, so the key problem for sensor data acquisition is to ensure data accuracy and reliability. In this paper, we follow the sequence of sensor signal flow, present senso...